Wednesday, February 22, 2006

World-wide Wrath of the Pathogens

I try to have some kind of wittiness at hand for articles like this, but in the face of exotic ecumenical epidemics cutting swathes out of humanity like G.I. Joes in front of a Wheat Thresher, I just shut up.

From the BBC article:

"This accumulation of new pathogens has been going on for millennia - this is how we acquired TB, malaria, smallpox," said Professor Mark Woolhouse, an epidemiologist at the University Of Edinburgh, UK.

"But at the moment, this accumulation does seem to be happening very fast.

"So it seems there is something special about modern times - these are good times for pathogens to be invading the human population."

Professor Woolhouse has catalogued more than 1,400 different agents of disease in humans; and every year, scientists are discovering one or two new ones.

(bbc article)

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I'm Troy Doney. I'm on the internet. I'm the writer of the blog "Off the Reservation" at New West. I also write a blog at Reznet. My personal blog is Man Bites Dog. I post my pictures at Flickr and I write short sentences at Twitter.